What bamboo and developers have in common

July 2017

The GDG Coast Lebanon co-founder, Rayan Al Zahab, tells us that her favorite
part of all events is the discussions after an event itself and how communities
talking openly about diversity can help lead to a more accepting society. In the
conversation with her we also found out what developers and bamboo have in
common.

Rayan Al Zahab

Rayan, why did you become a community organizer?

I wanted to excite more women about IT and make the path easier for them. I knew
from my own experience that you can feel pretty lonely not having peers or
mentors to turn to. Since January 2016, our GDG
chapter has grown to 158 members. We
have both students and senior developers. Women participation in our meetups is
never less than 35%.

What achievements are you most proud of?

I organized and spoke at the Google Developers Roadshow in Mecca, Saudi Arabia
in 2016. We had two separate events, one for women only and one for men only. I
was feeling really sick, but managed to host and speak at the event for several
hours with just one other organizer helping me. Another challenge was the
language. Although the culture is similar, in Saudi Arabia they learn in Arabic
at school, whereas in Lebanon it's French/English. So I literally had to prepare
vocabulary for my presentation. It was all worth it because of the positive
feedback from the 50 women that attended the event. It was like you'd pour water
over a desert. Five or six of them applied to start a new GDG Mecca chapter and
I was mentoring them to start WTM chapter as
well.

That sounds like a very successful event, and you mentioned that some participants got interested in becoming organizers. How do you handle chapter growth in general?

Lebanon is a very small country, so it's hard to attract new members. We partner
with other companies in the ecosystem, like Lebanese American
University, various incubators like
BDD, and
ANTWork to attract their community members to our
events. We just make sure we alternate locations of our meetups to attract a
diverse audience.

We're mentoring university students to have their own GDG chapter at the
LAU. They have similar schedules and will have a space
for regular, smaller meetups for free at the campus. Of course, the risk is
dividing the community. But I think that they could meet regularly as a student
group, and we could have larger events together.

The association with the Google brand also helps when talking to partners. Hosting
an event that Googlers attend helps the credibility of such an event. We also
work with some private companies and I just heard that one of them is making GDG
meetups count toward the work hours of its employees. One of their managers called me
to say that their developers are learning so many useful things. I offered him
to prepare content for workshops and he was very excited about the opportunity.
This is how you do it I guess, build on relationships that you make as you go.

How do you decide about the content of your meetups?

This was challenging at the beginning, but we found that setting the
expectations before the event really helps – even if you don't have a diverse
audience. We did a Machine Learning meetup and we made it clear that the first
hour would be a general introduction even for non-tech folks (I created content
for this part myself), and then we moved to more complex content. This worked
well for both junior and senior participants. Also, dividing a meetup into
presentations and codelabs is useful. Participants who don’t want to join a
codelab can move to networking.

Do you face any interesting challenges?

I want to create a self-sustaining operational model for my chapter. The idea is
to find members that will become organizers and speakers. We have a few such
members and we're on the right track, but we're not there yet.

Sometimes it's also difficult to talk about Google products and perks - like free
product subscriptions - knowing that they are not yet available in Lebanon.

What do you think you are best at?

This is something I've always heard from other people: I'm good at public
speaking and come across as a natural leader. I do better if I don't prepare too
much for my presentations. It just feels natural to me to be on stage.

Also, living in Lebanon means that you have to embrace diversity by nature. We
have a lot of folks with different opinions - and coming from 18 different
religious backgrounds, you learn to understand other perspectives. I didn't
realize this until I met communities that were more homogenous.

My company, BambooGeeks is my other
passion. So much so that I'm financially supporting this project from my
savings and some support from an NGO. I want to bridge the gap between what
you learn at a university and what the market actually wants. Developers (and
people in general) need to be like bamboo – able to grow and teach themselves as
the IT world is constantly evolving. In the future, I want universities and
companies to financially support BambooGeeks activities, and for students to pay
just a commitment fee for the courses.

Keeping the conversations going is something that a lot of communities are dealing with. What tools are you using to help you?

Meetup.com works perfect for us. We send out a
newsletter, reports from meetings, and invites to members through
Mailchimp.

What in the near future are you looking forward to the most?

In August, Google is hosting the Women Techmakers Summit of the region in Lebanon, and we'll be hosting 50 WTM Leads in Lebanon along with 20 Googlers. The attendees will also be running most of the sessions, workshop, and keynotes of the Arab Women in Computing conference. I'm very much looking forward to this.

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